PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  So . . . five of them. Old McReedy had insisted on bringing his .45 revolver, taken from a dying Black and Tan in 1921 when he was a thieving child in Dublin. “God save us all if he ever shoots that thing,” Keely told Ahern. Then she admonished her father, “We aren’t goin’ to fight the Tommies,” and secretly unloaded the weapon before giving it to him.

  It was their matriarch, their grave, yet they had come at the dinner hour hoping to avoid the wrath of Brone McCabe. They didn’t try to bring the Volvo and the horse trailer for hauling away the coffin through the gates into the tightly hemmed rows of markers. Instead, they parked on the road and filed in, Ryan first, Crevan last, an age progression of the anomalous face. The first three carried shovels and ropes, and by the time Keely steered the faltering old man to the site, the younger men had the plot hemmed and the sod rolled halfway back.

  “This is stupid,” Ryan mumbled, having no great nostalgia for his grandmother, who had died two decades before he was born. His grandfather’s shallow open-mouthed gasps made him uneasy. What if the old man died right here? He hadn’t walked this far in twenty years, and now he was propped up against a neighboring headstone, wheezing away and staring like a fish. By the time they reached the coffin (and didn’t that scare the bejesus out of a body) he might be ready to drop into the hole himself. “This is stupid,” he repeated.

  “Shut up,” his father said.

  “It’s bad luck to disturb the dead. You told me that.”

  “Can’t be helped. Shut up and dig.”

  “God forgive us,” Dwyer threw in for no reason.

  Then Keely began to chatter beneath her breath.

  “And what are you doin’?” Ahern demanded, pausing with a shovelful of dirt.

  “Prayin’.”

  “Well, do it back in the car. Take father and say a rosary.”

  “Will you go, father? We’re doin’ no good standin’ here. You can see that. No use all of us incurrin’ mortal sin ”

  “Lord, Keely,” Ahern said. “You share the blame, don’t deny it.”

  “I think he’s asleep.”

  “McCabe?”

  “Father. He’s asleep.”

  The old man hung stone still, his skinny haunches resting on the headstone, his eyes glazed, his breathing almost a snore.

  “Get him out of here, Keely.”

  She shook him and Crevan McReedy turned slowly, making sounds like a walrus before he asked if dinner was ready.

  “‘Tis, father. Let me help you back to the car.”

  He accepted her hand, was led.

  “Stupid,” Ryan affirmed.

  “Shut up.”

  “God forgive us.”

  They dug with a will now, anxious to be done. Three men tossing dirt, never thinking why Brone’s dog Mr. Billy hadn’t barked, sweating from fear as much as effort. When the first shovel rang off the coffin, they all stopped and Dwyer crossed himself. Conscious that they were standing on the sacred remnant of their matriarch, they worked awkwardly to dig a channel around the box. It went slowly, but finally they had the thing rigged and Ahern stood on one side while Dwyer and Ryan stood on the other.

  “We’re puttin’ a curse on her and we’re puttin’ a curse on ourselves,” Ryan warned in the stillness that had settled over the churchyard.

  “Once and for all, will you shut up?” his father directed.

  And then they hauled. Ahern backed over the adjacent grave plot, straining mightily, a rope around each wrist like Samson in chains, while his brother and son hauled hand over hand opposite him. The worst of it was righting the box on the lip of the grave, because it slid and they all heard the terrible thumping inside.

  When it was steady at last they stood blowing like horses, arms dead weary, turning a little to avoid looking at each other.

  “It’s not too late to return her where she belongs,” Dwyer said, clearly spooked.

  “We’ve gone this far, we’re not stoppin’,” Ahern replied, whisking dirt from the hair on his forearms. Then he stomped around the hole and positioned himself to lift one end of the coffin against his back.

  “What about the pit?” posed Dwyer.

  “McCabe can manage it.”

  “What about the shovels?”

  “We’ll come back will you lift your end, please?”

  They edged their way around the piles of dirt and the hole itself, and then they bumped along a zigzag route, headed for the finialed gates. The coffin was not as heavy as they had supposed, but they made frequent pauses to refresh their grips on the grimy box. It was on the second of these that they heard the spanking sound unfurl behind them. Ryan and Dwyer, who were lifting from either side of the trailing end, glanced back in dumbfounded awe. The coffin lurched and came roughly to the ground. Then Ahern faced around and began to moan.

  A sheet of fire raged out of the dispossessed grave. And as they stared in horror it jumped to the lip of the hole and ran toward them. Ryan bolted but was struck off his feet by his father, who in the same motion began to drag the coffin.

  “Lift her coffin! . . . lift it, lift it!”

  Dwyer, who was staggering rubber-legged, found his balance and absorbed the command at the same time that Ryan crawled to his feet and caught up his end of the box. Bowels awash, sweating and chilled at the same time, the trio never dared look back but made it to the gates at something close to a dead run.

  At Ahern’s shout Keely had the presence to open the horse trailer door, though her face went to “O’s” of shock and intimidation as she gaped at the fiery grave. In slid the coffin like a pizza pan into an oven. Somehow they got the procession faced around toward the village, Merna McReedy’s coffin thundering horribly as they jounced across the apron of grass in front of the fence that encircled Thiollaney Merriu.

  “What happened?” Keely demanded tersely at the wheel.

  But all she got was Dwyer’s mumbled prayers and Ahern’s quavering.

  “Old Scratch himself . . . we’re damned . . . were damned!” Ryan cried.

  Crevan McCreedy, snoring sonorously in the front seat, never awakened.

  ***

  “Ah, Billy, Billy, I wish you was here to see this,” Brone McCabe said with a sniff as he stood among the ash trees watching the departing horse trailer. “Now I don’t have to worry about accommodatin’ old McReedy when he goes to meet his maker. And d’you think they’ll all five be able to resist tellin’ about the Hell fire that comes when you open a grave in Thiollaney Merriu? Not likely. Not likely, Billy. We’re safe from further exhumations, I should think.”

  And walking stiffly, the empty twenty-liter petrol can banging off his thigh, he returned to the house.

  39

  “I’m not comin’ in unless you’re decent,” Sosanna said at the door. She held the green pillow like a breastplate.

  “My tux is in the dryer and I’m not wearing shoes,” Lane confessed taking a step backward and waggling one bare foot.

  She sauntered in, looked around, turned to face him. “Your Dream Pillow doesn’t work.”

  “That’s what I thought the first time, too.”

  “No dreams. No dreams atall.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought the first time.”

  “Here. It’s washed. I slept on it.” She blushed a little, realizing her practiced excuse for this visit was coming out backwards. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  He smiled faintly. She was as nervous as he was. “No dreams at all? Sorry to hear that. I dreamed I danced across Ireland with a faerie queen.”

  “Did you, now?”

  A little confession; a little trust. It was still there, the magic they had felt in the gloaming of Connemara.

  “You look exhausted,” he said. “You have to go to sleep before you can dream, you know.”

  “Is that how it works?” She plunked down on the slat futon that defined the cottage parlor with its garish jungle-print cushions. “I didn’t sleep much, as a matter of fact.”

  “I have
that effect on women.”

  “Sorry, it wasn’t because of you.” She hadn’t intended on telling him anything about her mother digging up a grave, but now she realized she had turned to him just by coming here. She couldn’t turn to her father, and here was the American with his probing mind and a consuming interest in the very mysteries of her life of Thiollaney Merriu at the very least. “We had . . . an incident.”

  “Your father?”

  “My mother.”

  He lifted the Dream Pillow aside from where she had placed it on the futon and sat down next to her. “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s very upsetting,” she said. “I don’t know if I can tell anyone . . .” And then she told him, of course. Bluntly at first. Stating the bizarre facts of her mother’s behavior, letting him ask the questions, watching his eyes to see how shocked he might be, how poisoned his opinion of her family, of her. But he passed that test, too. She felt a longing to be close to her mother, she said, to comfort her, to come to her aid in the tormented mystique of her being, her frequent withdrawals, her frustrating silences, her obsession with search, but

  “And your father doesn’t know about any of this?” he interrupted.

  “He doesn’t know about last night. Or maybe he does. When I went out there this mornin’ to see if I could tidy up the damage to the grave, I couldn’t find a sign of disturbance. No one can dress up a grave like my father. He may have been out there rollin’ new sod. I don’t know. Hard to believe I couldn’t find a trace, but there was none.”

  “Ah, there it is, there it is . . . it was a dream.”

  Her glistening almond eyes grew forthright. “It wasn’t a dream.”

  “It was.” And when she looked at him with waning doubt, he took her hands and repeated, “. . . it was.”

  “How can you know? You weren’t there.”

  “I went places in my dreams, talked to people and did things, too. I had real effects.”

  “Only effects?”

  “There’s a rational basis for it, I’m sure. The pillow is full of herbs or something. I’m going to have it tested when I get back to the States. And I’m not ruling out some kind of psychological transference. This place” he lifted her hands slightly “Connemara . . . Darrig is so rooted in odd beliefs, I’m sure there are individuals here who convey strong ”

  “Stop it.”

  He sank back on the futon, surprised.

  “Can’t you leave it at that?” she said. “If you believe you did things in dreams, why does there have to have an infernal logic to it? Why can’t there be all the things you say you don’t believe in?”

  “There can’t be, that’s all. It’s . . .”

  She pulled her hands free of his. “Illogical.”

  They sat staring at the floor, isolated again, a shaking head, a tapping finger.

  “Isn’t it funny,” she said presently, “I’m tryin’ so hard to convince you of a reality I had last night and you’re tryin’ to convince me to believe in a dream? We’ve reversed roles that’s how hard we’re tryin’ to meet.”

  “Faith and logic. Never the twain shall meet.”

  “To a blind man it’s logical that there aren’t any colors, I should think. Unless he’s been told colors exist and has the courage to believe in them. You don’t believe.”

  “That’s not courage, that’s willfulness. That’s the world’s history of inhumanity to man in its seed stage ‘my belief is better than your belief.’”

  “Haven’t you ever just listened to your heart?”

  “Not since it lied to me.”

  They looked at each other, the gulf threatening to widen.

  “Listen . . . listen,” he had her hands again, “I’d love to believe. I think you’re beautiful because you believe. You’re trusting, innocent, vulnerable. I’d love to share your reverie. But I know what it’s like to be vulnerable, and I don’t want to go through it again, thank you. It’s cash on the line for me. No paper promises. The world is full of shams.”

  “Am I a sham?”

  He stared intently at her, blue eyes rising one degree above the freezing point. “Not yet,” he whispered.

  “Thank you for bein’ honest. And I’ll apologize now for disappointin’ you in the future.”

  “Why will you disappoint me in the future?”

  “Because you think I’m a child, and that’s what you like, but if you had your way, I’d learn to believe what you believe and still be a child. I can’t be both you and me.”

  “I don’t want you to change.”

  “One of us would have to change.” She fanned herself with a bare hand. “Listen to us . . .”

  And that was when he kissed her, only it wasn’t a big passionate surrender to biological imperatives, it was a gentle peck on the forehead. So she let it happen and didn’t reciprocate or even squeeze his hands. An I-care kiss had just been brushed onto her brow, and that took them another step toward trust.

  “All right,” she said, “say what happened with my mother last night was a dream. The future, the past I don’t know which it was supposed to be but it was just as real as the present.”

  “And just as dangerous, too. I think . . . I think it’s possible to suffer the consequences of the dream. You may have actually left your house and gone out to the graves.”

  “So what would happen if we dreamed together on the Dream Pillow?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Would we share a dream?”

  He didn’t know, wasn’t sure it mattered. It mattered to her, though.

  “Sleep with me,” she said, and he nearly choked.

  She was exhausted from not having slept and from her misadventure of the night before. He said he hadn’t slept either (he had slept like a stone). She never even kicked off her shoes, just nestled onto the pillow she carried to his bed, her back to him. He took his wallet out of his pocket, his keys. He started to unbutton his shirt, imagined her wrath, buttoned it up again. Then he lay down beside her. If she thought he was actually going to fall asleep, he had a bridge he wanted to sell her. He was still thinking that forty minutes later when his breathing finally deepened to match hers.

  ***

  “Wake up,” he said and shook her, but she wouldn’t be roused. Not for long minutes, and by the time she did sit up and shook the cobwebs from her senses, he was gone.

  She ran to the door, then out into the gloaming, and she hadn’t gone far when she heard the music “The Point of No Return” and that was how she knew it was a dream. He was waiting for her, the steel-blue Fiat Punto’s lights cutting through the haze, its radio pulling in the haunting strains. He really did look like the phantom of the opera, masked in shadow, silhouetted in mist. But his fingers around hers were warm and moist as they danced and she caught the familiar glint of his ice blue eyes in the flicker of lightning far out over the ocean. Round and round they went, becoming breathless and aglow, and it made her think of the trooping sidhe who drew mortals into an eternal dance.

  An early moon, baleful and chrome yellow, skidded into place above his left shoulder, but when she spun again and looked it was gone. No, there it was, over his right shoulder. A misshapen moon at a curious angle, with a drop of blood in the middle. And then she swung in his arms and was jarred by the twin aspect of a second moon, back over his left shoulder again. It must be an optical illusion, like heat lightning, like fata morgana, right down to the drop of blood. Another whirl and now both moons were gone, as if they were eyes with blood-red pupils that had suddenly shut. And maybe that was what they were, because the haze was lashing into an outline of something gigantic, something in motion on such a scale that it was difficult to discern.

  The music was beginning to contort like the sky, its dissonant chords becoming flat, then aberrant, then nightmarishly harsh. Above it rose the sluggish roar of the sea, wave after wave collapsing so palpably that she felt the air gust in rhythm to the surges. And now, as if it too were caught in the pulse, light beg
an to play tricks: shadows flowing landward like black crepe outracing the surf, and then retreating, igniting cinders of white energy in its wake.

  Black . . . white . . . black . . . white the noir figure in Sosanna’s arms flickered with the cycle. First the phantom, then Lane, each one a blur fighting for completeness. Gradually she began to feel the distinction: the phantom’s fingers cold and stiff, Lane Andersen’s touch warm and animated; the phantom’s shoulder bony, rigid; Lane Andersen’s body pliant, flowing. Faster and faster they danced. Louder and louder the waves roared. Shadow into light, light into shadow. Shape-shifting partners struggling for existence. Each illumination unmasked another phantom. Her father’s glower. Flann Macloy’s leer. Mabbina Conneely looking startled “. . . why, the extra skin, of course. The skin between your toes.”

  Sosanna twisted out of the embrace as the sea swept in, lifting her off her feet. She thought she saw a figure treading steadily in the swirl, but when she struggled closer it was the Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu. She was home somehow. If land filled with corpses could ever be home to the living. And now it was washing away. Fetid miasma hung in the air and effluvium hissed to the surface as sepulchers and caskets blew like leviathans.

  The sky was black, the water was black, yet there remained a narrow band of illumination on the surface of the sea. She could see black coffins floating and the bobbing shrouds of grave-sprung things sluicing water as they surfaced and re-sank, raking her legs, embracing her from behind. Last to go under were the white flat faces of her dance partners: her father and Mabbina Conneely, clawing feebly, looking surprised.